Disclaimer; I’m never going to watch or read the rest of Attack on Titan. I think it’s a gross, misanthropic story. So if I’m completely wrong about the conclusion let me know n the comments
Since “media literacy” and “How could you say my blorbo is a fascist?” are constant and inescapable on the net, I was once again drawn in to the “Is AoT fascist?” discourse.
I stopped watching AoT during the first season because it’s a story of a bunch of valiant heroes grimly marching to their deaths in a war of annihilation against a teeming swarm of sub-humans who exist for no other purpose than to crush the light of civilization in an orgy of mindless violence.
Which is to say, the straightest possible portrayal of the fascist world view.
But many in the discourse argue that this isn’t fair, the author clearly shows that the protagonist is the bad guy, people are dumb and media illiterate. Well, I don’t want to watch four seasons of gorn just to weigh in on weird anime discourse, so let’s just look at a summary of the conclusion of the story.
Let’s see… minority with tainted blood who once ruled the world with an iron fist gains control over superweapons and immediately uses them to exterminate all of pure blooded humanity, even though he didn’t have to, as human history is a zero-sum clash of civilizations in which there is no possible alternative but an inevitable war of annihilation between those of pure blood and those of tainted blood. Also apparently The Jews The Marleyan Royal Family secretly set the whole thing in motion.
No fascism detected! What a relief! It’s a good thing the author expressed his view that racial war of annihilation is the only possible conclusion to the inevitable clash of civilizations! I was afraid he’d look directly at the camera and say “Everything that Hitler believed is correct and I have written a story reflecting that”.
Like, seriously, the story starts with the Jews Eldians engaged in an auto-cannibalistic war of annihilation, and the story ends with the protagonist, once noble and heroic, revealing his true Jewish Eldian nature by annihilating humanity for basically no reason. “Eren is the bad guy!” Yeah no shit, that’s exactly what the author said; The Jew cannot overcome his nature and will inevitably destroy the world no matter what. He set up a story where we sympathize with the hero, and then in the end the hero is shown to have inevitably turned in to a monster as the power of his tainted blood leads him to destroy real humans. It’s Race Realism: The Motion Picture
Or maybe I’m totally wrong. idk, because I don’t want to watch 40 hours of miserably nihilist murder porn written by someone who pretty obviously hates humanity.
Final thought; Isayama is Zach Snyder if Zach Snyder hated humanity.
For my next trick I will explain why Fullmetal Alchemist; Brotherhood is apologia for the crimes of Imperial Japan
Edit: I have observed that a lot of people are assessing AoT’s message based on what the characters say or do. I was recently introduced to the idea of “Diegetic Essentialism”, an emerging, often unconscious, belief among many people that media can only assessed within the context of the story, with the characters treated as though they were real people instead of puppets of the authors. Thus, “Isayama depicted all sides as miserable fascists” is considered important, rather than examining the world the author created and what that says about the author’s beliefs about humanity and life.
Here’s the post that introduced me to Diegetic Essentialism. From our buds over at /r/Sigmarxism, of course. I’d been struggling to articulate something I saw for a long time and this gave me a name for what I had seen.
What you’re attributing to diegetic essentialism is the Thermian argument: using in-universe lore to deflect criticism. Slightly different thing.
Diegetic essentialism is when people (including leftists) flatten all meaning in a work in order to put media into boxes. The examples given in sigmarxism are Beasts of Chaos and Tau being written with superficial anarchists/communist aesthetics, so therefore BoC are anarchists and Tau are communists. (Neither of those things are true)
We do this because we need to let our in-group know that we’re watching the “correct” media, that we’re completely unproblematic because the media that we consume is completely unproblematic. (It doesn’t work that way)
Let’s use Attack on Titan as an example
I think it’s somewhere in season 3-
There’s a moment where the main character, who’s basically spent his whole life being taught to hate a dehumanised enemy, finds out that the “monsters” who destroyed his life are people exactly like him, scared children who were also taught to hate a dehumanised enemy: him.
And that shoe dropping makes such a potent anti-fascist message, because it lays bare in narrative form exactly how fascism fails, how it warps and distorts history in order to perpetuate a lie, because we’ve been with Eren from the start and seen his journey, and his shock at this revelation is echoed in the shock of the audience. It’s legit good storytelling.
And if AoT ended right there things would’ve been fine, but oh well.
My reading of AoT: AoT is the single most incompetent anti-fascist story ever told, that it warps right back around into endorsing fascism and anti-Semitism. This is because Isayama is a liberal: the moral of his story is “an eye for an eye makes the whole world genocided”, which is an idealist idea of fascism, a child’s understanding of fascism. Eren revealing himself to be a petulant manchild committing genocide because he’s afraid of losing his mother figure is supposed to be tacit condemnation, but Isayama still lets him get away with genocide, like the liberal he is. We’re just supposed to feel bad about it.
Anyway, going back to diegetic essentialism: anyone who asks “Is X piece of media ______” is deeply unserious and more often than not simply looking for validation of their own political beliefs. Art/media criticism is about deeply and seriously examining human subjectivity, to explore what that tells us about the world we inhabit and the people who inhabit it. Within us there are multitudes, and not even authors have the authority to dictate the meaning of their works- we have to determine that meaning for ourselves.
This isn’t what diegetic essentialism is at all. Diegetic essentialism refers to ignorance of the author’s intent and a treatment of a story as if it is “real”. That post did mention what you said here too, but diegetic essentialism is a separate but connected phenomenon, most prominently seen in “but female spus marines don’t exist!” debate bros.
OP links the post you’re citing, I find it unlikely they didn’t read it.
Right, what I was trying to get at is the “essentialism” part of DE, which I think is the more important aspect to emphasize.
Sure, but I am doubting he fully understood it if reading
would result in a thread where OP did a wikipedia cliffnotes reading of AoT asking if it’s fascist.
My lit prof would have had my head on a pike if I tried to write a paper with this methodology.
(Also, to be clear, I’m not even saying his conclusions are wrong, Isayama really is Zach Snyder if Zach Snyder hated humanity.)